The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Gradually, the fog over national conference is clearing

    Gradually, the fog over national conference is clearing

    A  few days ago, it all but became clear that the national conference advocated by President Goodluck Jonathan would, in spite of the best optimism of most Nigerians, miscarry badly. First was Dr Jonathan’s final decision to quit prevaricating over what to call the conference. When he needed the conference to be accepted, he had hesitated between calling it a national conference and describing it as a national dialogue. He never tried to call it sovereign conference, for he was not as starry-eyed as the incurable optimists who have embraced it. In his October 1 address, he vacillated between dialogue and conference. Since then, every speech he has given, whether prepared or extempore, he has called it dialogue. National conference apparently rankles him. Words or manner of speech of a person often gives an insight into the workings of the mind, and the obscurantist Dr Jonathan at bottom loathes the idea of a national conference. However, he would go with anything that buys him time and fascinates his detractors.

    Second was what to do with the reports of a conference/dialogue when or if it is finally held. In his previous speeches, the president had been silent on the national dialogue report’s destination. In fact, he seemed to leave it open-ended, and it pleased the eager proponents of the exercise, especially the advisory committee who imbued it with a destination of their own imagination and choosing. However, late last week, the president finally showed his hand. While receiving members of the Muslim Ummah during the Eid-el-Kabir, he revealed that the report of the national dialogue would be sent to the National Assembly for their ratification. Though the advisory committee has sought to keep the matter of the report’s destination open by saying that that issue was yet to be determined, the fight is all but lost even before the battle is joined.

    Dr Jonathan has, however, tried to be clever by half. He suggests that the electorate could put pressure on the National Assembly to do what is proper with the dialogue report, but he has not indicated that the report would go to the legislature unedited. In my view, not only will the report be doctored, assuming it holds and is not aborted, even the legislature will also do substantial editing of the report, for they themselves are engaged in some delicate form of constitution review, and have definite views on what the outcome should look and sound like. As a matter of fact, everyone who has spoken on the dialogue, whether the president or the National Assembly, not to say the advisory committee which is already feeling the weight of higher responsibility and has begun to talk and act with the infuriating tentativeness of officialdom, has vowed that the dialogue would reinforce Nigerian unity. How can they tell?

    It seems obvious that before the advisory committee is through with its assignment, the president will have shown his hand much more clearly. First, national conference became definitively national dialogue; then the destination of the report was revealed as the National Assembly; and finally, unity became the lodestar of the exercise. Soon, the amazing magician will deal us his most devastating hand, assured as he has always been that Nigerians are an incredible, impressionable lot.

  • In search of food sufficiency

    It does not make sense to first kill the people in order to feed them sufficiently

    There is a simple but strong dictum I believe in and it goes thus, ‘when all else fails, eat.’ Well, there must be an awful lot of failures around me for I suddenly find that my pair of bathroom scales has begun to tell lies again. (Sigh!) That’s p-u-speak for saying that I seem to be gaining weight. But, you really cannot believe everything these scales tell you. It’s a little like that joke about a grandmother who told her grandchild that when people die they turn to dust. Well, what does the child do but to look under her bed and conclude that people are dying there because it is full of dust? So, I now wonder, what failures can be causing me to take refuge in the traditional comfort that food provides? Actually, there is a long list. First, there’s government’s failure, then there’s government’s failure, and then there’s more government’s failure.

    Seriously, any average newspaper reader would have come to the conclusion that there is a great deal of government bashing in the press. True, but there is a reason for that; ya see, every blessed thing in this country is woven around the pleasures of the government. Ya want to breathe, beg the government; ya want to eat, tention. What was the government doing about food insufficiency? I learnt the answer in a village. Not too long ago, a complaint came from a village that some people had come asking, nay, telling the people that the government had asked them to take over their entire land to use for planting crops. Were they government officials? No, they were not. Well, we thought it was better to make sure, like; since the government is so powerful here. Well, if they were not officials of the government, what were they?

    As it turned out, they were from the government and they were not from the government. I suppose that makes me sound as dubious as the government. Apparently, in its drive for food sufficiency, the government had desired and secured the involvement of private entrepreneurs willing to invest in farming. This to me is a most excellent idea which I welcome with every breath I’ve got. I still believe that the best way to feed this country with its teeming population is to grow the food within, not bring it from without. For someone as related to the soil as I have been (in more ways than one, obviously), I know it is not only possible, it is fairly easy to do. I also know that the best farmers in this world are not governments; they are individuals willing to bend their backs.

    But that is as good as it goes. It is not a good policy to ask private individuals looking for investment opportunities to go out and help themselves to people’s lands in order to make profit for themselves. If that is what is really on ground, then it stinks for many reasons. Well, there is the fact that villagers are unschooled and unsuspecting people who rely entirely on the government to give them direction and also protect them. Here, however, is the government throwing them to the wolves that are not only devouring the lands but even the people. Now, how fair is that?

    It is possible though that the government did not ask the enterprising individuals to go around seizing people’s lands. It might have asked them to negotiate. However, knowing how sensitive the matters of land can be, and how also very costly lands have become, your enterprising individuals may have found it easier to use federal muscle and might to ease their ways across the land. If indeed this is the case, then the government needs to be wise to the antics of its messengers. It does not make sense to first kill the people in order to feed them sufficiently.

    Let’s face it, the only insurance any helpless group of villagers has is the land. It is God-given, people protected and a sign of independence. This is why entire villages are ever so willing to go to war, fight to the last man or lose all. It is the only thing they have to hand over to their future generations; well, never mind if that future generation does not come. Now, should that generation eventually come, it too must be willing to protect the land in order to hand it over to the next… Honestly, I failed to understand it all before but I think with advancing age, I am getting a glimpse of the reason behind this protective custody that lands enjoy. It is a little like saving for the rainy day.

    True, most pieces of land just seem to sit out their days lazing under the rains, unused, untapped, unspoiled, and uncultivated; but consider, now that they are falling into private hands, whose progenies will they be handed over to: the private developer’s or the villagers’? Then, where does this policy leave the professional, soil-grown, rural farmer who owns much of the land even if he cannot cultivate or farm it? Should he watch on as his land, handed down from many fathers along the line, goes into the hands of his government’s private partners? Seriously?

    Honestly, I think this is a good policy. I have always thought and said that the backbone to any technological drive is agriculture. It not only provides much of the raw materials, it provides the impetus, challenges and adrenalin to invent stuff. However, the policy needs to have been thought through before being implemented. There are just too many questions that need to be answered. I mean, are the village’s lands leased, bought or acquired for this public-private partnership farming? At what point do they cease to be called the village’s properties? More importantly, the immediate challenge of growing so much food at once is where to store the surplus. Does the country possess enough storage facilities that will not malfunction mid-season while holding all our food?

    Now, how did I get to this point? Oh yes, I came out in search of the government’s solution to obesity but I guess I need to comb through the gazettes to find that. Perhaps, I should just stop doubting the official’s insincerity and accept that obesity is not a problem in this country; that fatness, along with the land, has been handed down from our forefathers.

  • America and its debt showdown: Mad dash into lunacy

    The course of recent events has again reveals that racism persists as a staple in the American political diet. The notion that the Obama presidency ushered in a post-racial harmony where skin color is irrelevant lies crumpled in brittle failure after having dashed headlong into the fortifications of mean reality.

    For over two weeks, Republicans shut down the federal government and threatened to cause America to default on its debt. The ostensible reason was their opposition to the health insurance reform known as Obamacare. The true cause of the obstinacy was something more visceral; it was a thing almost primitive in its dereliction to modernity and etiquette. Republicans hate the eponymous Obamacare with a passion usually reserved for foes in wartime. They detest the measure not so much because of the color of its provisions but because of the color of the man whose name it bears. After all, the bulk of the new law was authored years ago by conservative Republicans. The legislation, effective, is one of their own. Yet, Republicans are the greatest opponents of something they themselves previously had written.

    Their opposition is because of the man who now proposes the law. Once again, Republicans have shown they hate Obama not for what he is doing but because of the color he is. While Obama has been the obedient manservant of elite interests, the Republicans cannot see beyond his skin color. Although he seeks to be their man, they cannot help but see him as a boy who has forgotten his true and inferior place. They see him as they perceive most other Black men – as a crime waiting to happen, a belated slave insurrection in process. Thus, they hate him and everything he does, even when he serves them the very thing they ordered.

    Rarely, do I commend President Obama. I do so now. After five years of bowing and diffident bumbling attempting to gain approval from those who would rather evict him from the White House at the wrong end of a red-hot pitchfork, the President stood his ground. When the Republicans closed the government by refusing to pass a budget unless he agreed to inter his health care plan, he told them to walk the plank. He refused to blink when they also threatened default on the public debt by not raising the government’s artificial debt ceiling. Good for him.

    Overall, President Obama is too conservative politically and too cautious strategically to be a great leader. When the better path is a new or progressive one, he shuns that way. His inclinations would rather tread that road which others have walked before. Yet, the man is intelligent and has a nose the scent of impending disaster. He might not recognize the best worse of action; but, he is certainly aware when the worse approaches his portico. In 2009, he realized the economy was heading toward severe depression. Clearly wanting to avoid such a dank blot on his legacy, the man did just enough to avert disaster yet not enough to save the economy from its own excesses. The American economy did not collapse but it remains shaky and hard-pressed five years thereafter.

    On the present occasion, he realized the game the Republicans crafted was akin to inserting his head in the mouth of a firing cannon. He refused to follow their twisted logic; it would lead to nothing less than the failure of his presidency and a totally avoidable debacle for the American political economy.

    This combative state of affairs came to ferment because, every time they view Obama’s black skin, Republican eyes turn to crimson anger. Reason flees when hatred mounts its frenetic steed. Off the racist conservatives go, galloping toward a tryst with witless disaster. Should they bring the entire country down, they care not. To them, a nation with a Black president is a nation not worth having.

    The battle over health insurance reform was a pretext masking the more intensely personal confrontation. The real targets of the Republican shutdown of government and the threat to default on the debt were Obama and the very idea of liberal government itself. After Obama won reelection, conservative politicians conspired, concocting a noxious plan to divest the President of any meaningful legacy. They vowed to fight tooth and nail against anything he did or proposed. So filled with venom are they, staunch Republicans would likely rebuff Obama even if his counteroffer were the identical mirror image of their initial policy offer.

    In part, they hope to so discredit the Obama presidency that the nation will reject the notion of another Black President for, at least, two generations. When they say they want to work with Obama, they don’t have in mind the normal give-and-take of democratic governance. What they have in mind is more akin to how a vengeful hammer treats a recalcitrant nail. They seek to pound him into the woodwork. They see this as their holy secular mission. In the deepest chambers of their hearts where they speak the truth to themselves, they believe God intended America as a White nation. In effect, they see Providence as a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan. With this in mind, a Black president becomes an act of blasphemy; ousting him takes on the aspect of a religious crusade. Thus, the hard-core Republicans care little if their attempts against Obama appear clumsy or seem to backfire politically. They follow a calling higher than immediate political gain. They seek to return the nation back to its herrenvolk origins.

    Thus, the most racist wing of the Republican party, the Tea party, dared to shut down the government although the majority of Americans thought the act mean, if not insane. Just in case, they also have taken precautions that insulate them from political backlash. They have engineered and sculpted many congressional districts in a manner that only hard-line Republicans can win elections in these districts. Thus, their conservative radicalism will not drive them from office. Voters in this rapid districts will reward their racism with reelection and another stint in Washington to tear down the walls of liberal government friendly to racial and ethnic minorities and return it to its origin purpose as a bastion for White men.

    Conservative white men are now a minority report in American politics but Republican seek to revisit the day when all that mattered was the voice and vote of that group. America now lives in the second decade of the 21st century. These men would return her to the fifth decade of the 19th century, right before the nation warred against itself regarding that sticky little matter of slavery.

    The other objective of Republican brinksmanship is to dismantle the liberal portions of the American government. They detest the organs of government that provide social services to the old, the destitute, the sick, and the despondent. They seek to disinter the bones of President Franklin Roosevelt, the author of the New Deal programs that established the social safety net for the people at the bottom of the economic totem. The Republicans want to cast Roosevelt and his New Deal into the darkest part of the deepest sea.

    Obama and Roosevelt are the Democratic presidents the Republicans most reviled. They hate Obama for who he is and despise Roosevelt for what he did. If they could torch the legacies of both in one fell swoop, the Republicans would have achieve their historic mission. Thus, they were willing to shun popular will to shut down government and even court debt default. They figured if their racist god is with them, then that skittish Black man standing against them would ultimately buckle and fold.

    Obama did not blink. He could not afford the weakness. He understood his political life and legacy hung in the balance. In the end, the Republicans caved on both points. They agreed to reopen government and to lift the debt ceiling. Obama won a decisive victory. He embarrassed and outflanked his foes or so a reasonable person might conclude.

    Herein, lies the future high jinks. Hardline Republicans are not reasonable. Having been struck to the marrow by the vocation of hatred, they are like lunatics wandering the marketplace, fanatics blind to but one thing. Normal political considerations are no guide to predicting their behavior. They will eagerly risk sinking the ship again if this tack brings them closer to their benighted grail.

    A careful reading of the deal struck with the Republicans shows that Obama won a major battle. But the outcome of the larger war remains cloaked in uncertainty. Under the deal, the budget and debt deadlines were merely pushed forward several months to give the two sides time to negotiate a plan to reduce government spending.

    In other words, this present deal merely brings Obama to the spot he occupied in late 2011m when he failed in negotiating a “grand bargain” with the Republicans. That time, the Republicans left him with egg on his face by rebuffing his overture although it favored their interests greatly. Ironically, Obama was saved by the refusal because there was nothing grand about bargain save its reliance on economic principles that had been discredited by the recent recession. If enacted, the bargain would have helped the moneyed but been an injurious exchange for working class and poor Americans who comprise the bulk of the population. Under this initiative, President Obama proposed significant cuts to social services in pursuit of the counterproductive goal of balancing the federal budget.

    While Obama has gotten the better measure of the Republicans during this recent tempest, they also have his measure regarding how far he will bend on these fiscal matters. In 2011, he exposed a willingness to jettison chunks of the New Deal. In this, he walks in lockstep with the Republicans. Before, their racism blinded them to that fact.

    There is no reason to believe he will not bend again, if doing so will avert the twin disasters of a government shutdown and debt default. A shutdown and default are immediate calamities all will see and feel quickly; the whittling of the social safety architecture is a longer, more understated process impoverishing the people in gradual stages. Obama is susceptible to entering such an exchange for he is more adept at avoiding impending disaster than in navigation the country toward progressive, long-term economic policies and programs.

    I fear President Obama will see his recent victory over the Republicans not as a validation of the principle that he must combat their arch conservatism but as a validation of his gradual brand of the same economic and fiscal ideology. If so, his recent victory will be short-lived for he will quickly tender it in exchange for a longer-term strategic defeat of liberal and progressive principles. He would have won the recent war of nerves only to forfeit the ground won by surrendering to Republicans in the war of thoughts, the war of economic ideas.

    The notion that the federal budget should always be balanced or in surplus is inimical to sustained economic growth for America and the world. It is a simple matter of accounting. For government to enjoy a surplus inevitably means it attracts more revenue than it surrenders. This excess has to come from some place other than government. The surplus comes from the private sector. In other words, a government surplus requires the private sector collectively run a “fiscal deficit.” The private sector must shrink accordingly. Instead of escorting in a period of economic growth and stability, there are few measure more certain to reduce growth or spur recession than this.

    Moreover, the American dollar is the world’s reserve currency. This very status almost always requires America to run trade and fiscal deficits in order to keep the rest of the world supplied with enough dollars to lubricate global commerce. Attempting to run surpluses, yet stand as the reserve currency, is to seek contradictory objectives. It will be somewhat akin to reimposing the gold standard on global commerce. This will tend toward harmful deflation not handsome growth.

    Also the notion of a debt ceiling is a relic. The debt ceiling was created during World War I to curb war profiteering by merchants and industries converted from normal trade to fabricating and selling war materiel. This reason no longer exists as expenditure for war is no longer an extraordinary item. The American military expenditure has graduated from its ad-hoc nature during WW I to becoming one of the most complex, assiduously planned industrial endeavors known to mankind. Defense spending is now integral to the budget. War profiteering is no longer a special case to be held under close scrutiny. It is the norm; such spending is central to the institution of government and core to the American economy. It is no longer scrutinized but exalted.

    Also, the nation functioned under the gold standard at that time. Under the gold standard, deficits had to be resolved by a transfer from the nation’s limited stock of gold to an eager, awaiting creditor. Today, deficits are paid by the currency the government can readily print. To believe the American government can actually exhaust itself of the very currency it alone can print is to be believe in fables and useless canards. Lack of funds is something politicians say to deceive the people that government cannot afford to fund popular programs the politicians themselves dislike.

    American cannot run out of dollars any more than the ocean can be devoid of water. As the issuer of its own sovereign currency and a nation that pays all of its debts in that currency, America cannot go bankrupt unless it chooses to do so. Insolvency is not a problem. The nation can “print” a nearly inexhaustible supply of money. The more genuine problem is how to exercise the wisdom and discipline to know when to stop printing additional money because the marginal increase in money supply produces more inflation than it adds to real economic growth. Inflation, not insolvency, is the real barrier and concern.

    Thus, this crisis should have stoked debate exploring why a government that prints its own currency endures a system whereby it incurs additional debt to borrow the currency it prints. This issue was never raised during the crisis because establishment politicians, the orthodox media and the Money Power than finances the media and politics do not want ordinary people contemplating this question. If they understood the dimensions of the ruse played against them, the people might well demand such a refund as to shake the political economy to its elitist core.

    Government borrows its own money as part of an elaborate scheme to ensure profits to the biggest players in the financial system. These large financial houses hold most of the bonds government issues. These bonds are virtually risk free. Government has the unlimited ability to redeem them because government can issue currency to pay the debt obligation. Through this round-about system where government borrows its own money, government guarantees sure profits to large bondholders. This is a form of corporate welfare dwarfing the welfare the poor and destitute obtain. Politicians dare not question the spendthrift welfare given to Money Power; yet they excoriate, as inflationary and wasteful, the welfare given to those so poor that they still find it hard to survive even with the benefit of this public assistance. Imagine the misery if they were to go it alone without the meager aid now given.

    In the end, the tussles over the government shutdown and debt default were distracting sideshows. A false morality play offering false choices between bad and worse has been presented to the people. All established politicians are co-conspirators in the subterfuge, some wittingly, most unwittingly. The debt default and government shutdown have been cast as villains that could wreck life as we know it. To avoid the villainy, “hard choices” must be made to curtail budget deficits by smiting social services to the working class and poor.

    Having once stared down the Republicans, Obama and establishment Democrats will tell the people that the coming deal is the best that can be had; sadly, the people will believe the lie and acquiesce in their own impoverishment. In so many ways, American democracy has cast mean incantations upon itself. No longer is it democracy of the people. It has regressed to being a democracy of the elite.

    The hard-line elite, the powerful Republicans, seek to blanch everything in sight. They seek a nation that once again resembles itself during a simpler, less complex time when the conservative White man stood supreme and none challenged that supremacy. The other elite, the powerful Democrats, believe in social justice but tempered with an economic doctrine so akin to the Republican’s that the goal of social justice flees at the sight of a hardening economic reality. As such, the American people live a democracy that offers them a choice between bad and worse, sad and mean. The most depressing thing is the people know they have been had yet continue to seek rescue from the very people who have orchestrated the theft against them. Thus, beware of those who say they wish to bring the spirit of today’s American democracy to your shores for that spirit is now a mercenary, venal ghost of its former self.

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  • An untainted judge

    An untainted judge

    Justice Salami retires with his head high

    Justice Ayo Salami, former President of the Court of Appeal (PCA) finally retired from service on October 15. His case is one good example to show that the judiciary should not be in the hands of politicians, particularly when you have the kind of power mongers that are ruling the country today. All right-thinking Nigerians know that the discipline of judges starts and ends with the National Judicial Council (NJC). Unfortunately, the NJC at the time of the Salami crisis took the matter to President Goodluck Jonathan, who quickly seized the opportunity to exercise powers he obviously did not have, simply because it suited his partisan interest.

    At the risk of repeating myself, I dare say, without fear or favour, and without fear of contradiction that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) did not win the elections that it claimed it won in 2007 in the southwest. Those of 2003 were probably understandable; the people in charge of political leadership in the region committed political hara-kiri which made them lose the states, with the exception of Lagos, to the rampaging PDP. The saving grace for Lagos then was the political sagacity of the political leaders there, particularly the then Governor of Lagos State, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who saw through the shenanigans of President Obasanjo and refused to flow with him.

    However, as the leopard can never change its spot, the PDP that took over the south west after the 2003 election soon showed its true colour. To say that it did not know what to do with the power placed on its laps on a platter of gold in the election would be charitable because it knew what to do with it and in fact made a fetish of its misrule. It was not long for the politically sophisticated southwest people to realise that the PDP had no development blueprint for the region that used to be a pace setter in the country. Soon, the region began to witness the decadence for which the ruling party is notorious, a thing that made the Yoruba people swore to sack the PDP from the region. This they did with their feet and their votes in the 2007 election.

    Unfortunately, the PDP chieftains as usual, so enjoyed the government houses that they were not ready to leave the stage even after they had been voted out. That was an era when people who claimed they won governorship election lacked the courage to be sworn in in public, preferring instead, to do it in the confines of the government house. What followed the electoral heist in the region were litigations upon litigations and Justice Salami’s crime was that he was President of the Court of Appeal, the court that had the final say on governorship election petitions, going by the law at that time. Since virtually all the governorship elections in the region were rigged, save, again for Lagos, the PDP governments in the states one after the other, began to ‘capitulate’, with the election rogues in Ondo, Edo, Ekiti and Osun states sacked by the courts and the mandates reverted to the original owners.

    Although the PDP had been seething with rage over these monumental losses of a region it never won in that election, its anger was later to find expression in the crisis between the then Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Aloysius Katsina-Alu and Justice Salami, over the governorship election petition in far-away Sokoto State, which Justice Salami decided to look into, perhaps not knowing that the matter had deliberately been kept in the cooler by the powers-that-be who wanted it in the cooler, perhaps forever. That was the beginning of his ordeal. It was on this matter that the deep-seated hatred the ruling party had for him began to manifest, with one thing leading to the other until Justice Salami was suspended in 2011 by the NJC under the chairmanship of Justice Katsina-Alu. The man was never recalled; even after the NJC with which he had issues initially on the Sokoto matter had said he should be recalled. Thus, we had a situation whereby the government, for obviously partisan reasons, acted like an outsider that is weeping louder than the bereaved. The haste with which President Jonathan ratified the NJC’s decision to suspend Justice Salami is uncommon with his government and it left many tongues wagging.

    All these, for me, explain why we must ponder the Salami debacle, especially as the man had to retire from this unjust suspension foisted on him and the nation at large, by some infantile minds that would rather truth be put on the shelf for sale to whosoever may be willing to buy. It is a sad commentary on the way we easily allow serious matters to be swept under the carpet. I have always said that this is one of the things that successive governments in the country exploit. When the Salami matter started, many individuals and organisations, including the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) stood with the embattled PCA but the support soon waned, with time.

    This should not be so; unfortunately, it has always been so in Nigeria. It is Justice Salami today; we do not know who is next. It is particularly saddening because this is happening to the judiciary, the last hope of the common man and at this crucial time in the life of our country. If the government, particularly they type we have today, can get away with this, then, this country is in trouble. With the way things are going, the courts will be so busy after the 2015 elections; we can be sure of this given the desperation that is manifesting even when the contest is yet to start. Justice Salami’s experience is going to be at the back of the minds of many judges when electoral petitions involving the ruling party come before them after the elections. Of course, we know the likely consequences when people are denied their electoral choice. We know what to expect when the courts can no longer deliver justice.

    But the point still has to be made though, that those who ensured that Justice Salami never returned to service from his so-called suspension will always come to their own comeuppance; it is only a matter of time. There is a spiritual dimension to some of these things and when the punishment begins, people will be feeling sorry for them. Justice Salami should however, be proud of his service to the nation. He should be proud of the fact that he was able to hold his head high when many others would have lost theirs.

  • Education and democracy: training the future generation 5

    Education and democracy: training the future generation 5

    the more industrialized a country becomes, the more emphasis it needs to put on nature, scope, and quality of vocational and technical training 

    Vocational and technical education is an area that requires more attention than it normally gets in our pre-industrial or pro-industrial society. On the average, federal and state governments have done fairly well with establishment of polytechnics. With over a total of 40 public polytechnics (without counting a few private ones), the area that requires more emphasis is philosophy, policy, and implementation with respect to vocational and technical training. Emphasis will be on how to re-conceptualize vocational and technical education in relation to the current level of growth in our country, as well as in relation to our aspiration for future growth, more so when there is regular supply of electricity across the country and the need for technical work increases through cottage-style manufacturing.

    It is an axiom that the more industrialized a country becomes, the more emphasis it needs to put on nature, scope, and quality of vocational and technical training it needs to make available to citizens and employers of labour. Once there is regular supply of electricity, our demand for persons with vocational and technical training will increase phenomenally, as several companies and individuals will be in a better position to take new and more risks than now in initiating projects that require artisans, craftsmen and women, technicians, and other persons with training to respond to technical needs of producers and manufacturers.

    The acceptance that persons with Higher National Diploma can transfer their credits to universities to enroll for graduate programmes without having to obtain undergraduate degrees is a liberal or progressive attitude to take, in order to transcend the traditional dichotomy between university education and the training offered by polytechnics or colleges of technology. But there are other important issues that need new thinking on the relationship between academic and technical or vocational training. Presupposing that vocational training is inferior in any way to academic training is dangerous for any society that is aspiring to become industrialized or stay as an industrialized country. We cannot on one hand accept lower scores in J.A.M.B. or W.A.E.C. examinations and on the other hand continue to say that technical education is not inferior to academic training.

    We need to insist on equal entry qualifications for candidates wishing to enter the university or the polytechnic, more so if we are going to allow products of polytechnics to enroll for master’s degree courses after obtaining H.N.D. from polytechnics or colleges of technology. Similarly, our system should ensure that those who enroll in colleges of education and later hope to use their N.C.E. certificate to enroll for undergraduate training in the university have the same entry qualification to enter college of education as their counterparts wishing to enter the university.This is one effective and credible way to integrate polytechnic and university education. In other words, this would lead to having an educational system that accepts equality between H.N.D. and B.A./B.Sc. with the former leaning more towards practical or procedural knowledge while the latter leans towards theoretical or conceptual knowledge while both lead to some form of knowledge needed for increasing productivity.

    It is in respect of technical training, offered formally by technical schools across the country and informally by practicing technical workers who take on apprentices, that our country requires new thinking urgently. Apart from having too few technical colleges for a country aspiring to become an industrial one, the relationship between training in technical colleges, undergoing semi-formal apprenticeship or training under companies, and informal apprenticeship needs more thinking.While on the average about 52% of persons under the age of 22 train as technical workers in Germany, less than 5% of the same age group have any formal technical training in Nigeria. It is not an exaggeration that about 50% of citizens under the age of 22 in Nigeria are self-trained Okada drivers. Largely, Nigerians wishing to become mechanics, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. in Nigeria acquire their training through informal apprenticeship that is virtually unregulated by government or agency in terms of standards or quality assurance.

    Moreover, most of such apprentices in Nigeria do not have secondary education to give them some conceptual background that can enrich their learning and skills. The result of lack of literacy on the part of technical workers in the country is that many middle-class Nigerians in urban areas prefer to give jobs requiring technical skills to other West Africans, preferably those from Francophone countries close to Nigeria: Benin, Togo. Technicians from such countries are not only more efficient than their Nigerian counterparts, they are also more capable of explaining the cause of problems they have been hired to solve to their employers.

    The consequence of low levels of skills on the part of technicians in our country is that people in this category are very poorly paid by those who hire them, as most of those people see the average technician astrial-and-errorworkers. In addition, many of such workers prefer to drive Okada, which they believe to be more profitable than practicing their skills as mechanics or plumbers. In terms of income, only persons with academic degrees or vocational training from polytechnics have the opportunity of a middle-class income, when they are able to get jobs.

    One way to increase the skill level of Nigerians in technical and vocational fields is to make education free and compulsory for the first twelve years of schooling, after which citizens can choose academic or vocational/technical career paths. This policy option will make academic and vocational education part of tertiary education, thus removing the stigma that it is only citizens who are not eligible to enter universities or polytechnics that become technicians and who do not deserve to be paid as much as those with university education. This will encourage citizens to follow their passion in choosing career paths without feeling inferior for choosing to become a plumber and not a philosopher. Our country needs good plumbers as much as it needs good philosophers, if it is to create a modern economy in a democratic setting.

    Democracy emboldens citizens to participate in their governance, to ask questions of, and offer suggestions to those who govern them. But citizens without proper training—academic or vocational— are not likely to get or keep the jobs that can make them feel independent and capable enough to assert their citizenship rights. The old system of education that puts people with university degrees on top of the social ladder is a relic of colonial model of education. We now need a modern postcolonial model of classifying skills and knowledge in relation to determination of remuneration and other benefits. Encouraging every citizen to choose whatever career he or she can excel in without stigmatizing him or her for not going to academic institutions is the way to go in our new world that requires an agile workforce.

  • Fayemi: I have never been enlisted in a worthier cause

    Fayemi: I have never been enlisted in a worthier cause

    when he  says  his government  will do so and so  for a community, that community can literally go to sleep in complete  trust that  he will not fail them.

    I seek the indulgence  of  readers, following upon my last week article, to  briefly touch on the matter  of the National Conference and  ask a few questions  from those  who still  see  the conference as  the  ‘deus ex machina’  to Nigeria’s multitude of problems. Let me first and foremost; concede that of a truth, President Jonathan, for the love of country, had a change of mind. Are we to ‘ipso facto’,  assume that Mr David Mark, the Senate President was, by some telepathy or an angelic visitation, suddenly divinely  instructed to equally change his own mind or has the Nigerian sovereignty, to which he had hung his opposition like forever,  unknown to us lesser Nigerians,  suddenly taken leave of his National Assembly?

    This could still jolly well be a happy coincidence. But what then are we to   make of the Pauline conversion of Chairman Tukur, the relentlessly sabre-rattling boss of the ruling party who, only some days before the Independence Day Presidential declaration, wanted  Baraje and company  behind bars, to  suddenly  go soft,  go  on bended knees,  begging the same Baraje to bury the hatchet and join him  in presenting  a united front at the conference?   Are we to assume that all these three persons, and more, are united by love of country?  Can’t Nigerians see this Greek gift and well calibrated diversion, thrown like meat to the dog for the simple aim of keeping it busy on a useless piece of bone?

     Let me equally hazard a guess: in some very coy ways, Nigerians will soon come to see very senior academics, well known for their brilliance, recruited to interrogate the scheme as we saw in the IBB SAP debates. It is a beaten path of unscrupulous politicians cleverly leveraging on these individuals’ integrity.  After all, a night or two at the NICON NOGA will not be a bad idea. Fortunately, there is nothing we cynics can do as it has become a ‘fait accompli. But I will be mightily surprised if the cynics do not laugh last.

     As we wind down to the 3rd anniversary of the inauguration of the  Fayemi administration in Ekiti state, it is apposite for me to take a critical look at a man, and a period, in my home state, which have been  truly phenomenal. I am currently writing a book; not an autobiography, nor one to give earth-shaking behind-the-news  stories  of  epochal political decisions,  having really never been a  politician  in the Nigerian sense;  but one in which I have solemnly declared that, and I quote: ‘ I have never been enlisted in a worthier cause than that of Dr Kayode Fayemi’. And that is neither talking glibly nor intended to patronise.  I have been privileged to be part of building a University from scratch just as I have worked very closely for upwards of three years  with eminent Yoruba citizens, among them the likes of  Lt. General  Alani Akinrinade, Dr Amos Akingba, Professors  Bolaji Akinyemi, Jide Osuntokun, Wale Omole,  Rear Admiral Akin Aduwo, Taiwo Alimi,  Mrs Tola Adenle, Mrs Dupe Ajayi- Gbadebo and Dr Dele Sobowale, to mention but a few, in mid-wifing  a Pan-Yoruba  Socio-Cultural organisation,  but seeing how Fayemi has fundamentally impacted  on Ekiti, my primary community;  his focus,  determination , commitment and self denial,  I have nothing but thanks to God that I am found lining behind a man of such  integrity  in his unstinting service to Motherland.  A man  to  whom, in his back,   Ekiti people have  recently  added  another  appellation  to his ‘ILUFEMILOYE 1’ , as they now call him O WI BE SE BE – ( certainly not deifying him), but  saying that this is a man who, when he  says  his government  will do so and so  for a community, that community can literally go to sleep in complete  trust that  he will not fail them. Such has been his believability that every city, town, village, hamlet and every human settlement in the state has, at least,  one project, completed or on-going. This is, of course, not surprising since his government’s annual budget is structured bottom up as  he and his  team  visit all nooks and cranny of the state to identify the peoples’ needs which then form the locus of the year’s budget. Whatever could not be accommodated that year is an automatic item in the next budget.

    This article is therefore not solely about enumerating brick and mortar, important though they are as it will also dwell on the Fayemi persona. He has remained truthful, not only to the state but, fundamentally, to himself. He has therefore spared nothing towards achieving his promise of making poverty history in the state – a pivotal part of his 8-Point Agenda. This obviously is not a 100 metre dash but rather, a long distance, multi-faceted project which he has followed with every sinew of his being. I once described him as a product of his upbringing and this has helped him greatly. Not one to carry position on his head, his calmness and simplicity – You need to have seen his equanimity fighting those men playing  god for his mandate – have all  made him extremely  easy to work with. Not for him the airs and garrulity so common with public office holders  in our country. Everything he does attests to these and as all, except the thoroughly politically jaundiced would see, he has become a man  after everybody’s heart:  serving as the pivot  of not only his Regional Governors’ Forum but a distinct leader of both the Progressive Governors Forum  and  the much-feared Nigerian Governors Forum, just as he is  a leading light of the All Progressives Congress Party, where those who should know, attest to his sterling contributions. One thing that particularly gratifies me is that when in those uncertain days I, at great risk,  elected to line behind him, people in power were eagerly seeking my support.

    At his inauguration on October 16, 2010, Dr Kayode Fayemi declared: ‘As am ushered into the governor’s office in Ado-Ekiti, make no mistake about it, I will ensure that you the good people of Ekiti state, own this government. I will do this by redesigning my agenda through the village square and town hall meetings. I promise to ‘democratise  governance, modernise agriculture, improve infrastructure, promote free and qualitative education towards the development of functional human capital, provide free health and social security to the disadvantaged sectors of our state; ensure industrial development, tourism and sustainable development as well as promote gender equality and women empowerment’.

    Dr Fayemi has never looked back.

    Today, education which had  reached its nadir in the state has since turned the corner. In addition to free education up to secondary school level and improvements in infrastructure and teacher quality, a total of 183 secondary schools and 836 primary schools have been renovated. Equally 48,000 laptops were distributed to secondary school students as additional 25,000 are already on order. The result was a quantum leap in the last WAEC results in the state which went from about 20 percent last year to about 70 per cent this year. Agriculture has been socialized and today over 20,000 youth have enrolled in the YCAD –the Youth Commercial Agricultural programme – in which they are not only trained in agricultural practice, given implements and additives but  also  given seed money. The programme is now being aggressively aided by a massive irrigation programme funded from the combined constituency projects of majority of the state’s National Assembly members.

    Health has received such a massive boost that only this past week, the Adunni Olayinka Diagnostic and Wellness Centre in honour of our unforgettable late Deputy Governor, for an array of cancer screening for early detection, was commissioned by the governor. This year, all hospitals in the state are being renovated and are to be more equipped.

    The mother of all the Fayemi quiet revolution is the unprecedented N5000, monthly  social security stipend to the elderly which now goes to no less than 25000 over 70 year-old citizens of the state.

    These wonderful efforts are replicated in every sector of governance.

    The governor is ably assisted in all these by two main persons and his entire team, namely,  his wife, Erelu Bisi Fayemi. Those interested in knowing more about this Amazon should please read my article: ELECT ONE, GET TWO, 19 June, 2011 which, in fact must now read like ancient history given her new exploits in empowering our people. The other is Professor Dupe Adelabu, who has fitted seamlessly into the Deputy Governor’s position. She was before her new appointment, the Chairman of the State SUBEB and remains a strong force in the trajectory of education in the state. As things stand today, Ekiti people could not have asked for more. Yet, there are lots more from where all  these came. To God be the glory.

     Next week – A peep into  Fayemi’s 2nd term

  • Jonathan’s SNC: a gathering of the elites, by the elites and for the elites? (1)

    Jonathan’s SNC: a gathering of the elites, by the elites and for the elites? (1)

    For the moment, I shall leave aside two important issues pertaining to the recent announcement of President Jonathan’s intention to convene a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) and proceed directly to the composition and agenda of the conference. These two issues that I shall for the moment leave aside are, first, the reasons why we need the SNC now and have in fact needed it for a long time and, secondly, Jonathan’s probable motivations now, at this moment, for convening the SNC. I shall return to these two questions at the end of the two-part series in which I wish to reflect primarily on the composition and agenda of the conference. But why this emphasis on the composition and agenda of Jonathan’s SNC?

    It is only with regard to the composition and agenda of the SNC that we will be able to tell whether Jonathan’s SNC will be substantially dominated by our political elites and their interests or will be truly democratic and include the interests of workers, farmers, tradesmen and women, youths, pensioners, the unemployed and future generations of Nigerians. In other words, it is by its composition and agenda that we will know whether Jonathan’s SNC will be a gathering of the elites, by the elites and for the elites or, conversely, a gathering in which the non-elite plurality of Nigerians will be present and will have their interests and the interests of future generations of Nigerians ably represented.

    At this point, it is necessary for me to state that my reflections in this piece do not come from a vacuum but are instead deeply informed by the widely publicized and debated views of individuals and groups that have been the loudest, the most insistent and, I might add, the most persuasive in the calls for the SNC in the last decade and half. In the light of these dominant views, the composition of the SNC should be based primarily on the so-called federating ethnic groups and geopolitical zones of the country. Everybody knows that this means the elites of the ethnic groups and geopolitical zones of the country. And with regard to the agenda of the SNC, the individuals and groups that have been tirelessly calling for the SNC place their focus almost exclusively on relations between the centre of power and authority in the federal government in Abuja and the regions and states of the federation. More pointedly, these individuals and groups see the roots of all that is wrong and perilous in our country at the present time in the over-concentration of power and authority at the centre. On this account, all the corruption, all the waste, all the squandermania, all the ineptitude, all the insecurity, and all the fractious disunity plaguing Nigeria and its citizenry flow from Aso Rock and Abuja and from that cesspit wash over the whole country. In other words, Boko Haram, the militants of the Niger Delta, the pipeline vandals, the extortionate and marauding gangs of kidnappers, the growing ranks of ethnic militias are all the direct and indirect products of the over-concentration of power, authority and sovereignty at the centre in Abuja.

    There is not the slightest doubt that there is some truth in this composite view of over-concentration of power and sovereignty at Abuja as the main structural basis of the crises of politics, society and economy in Nigeria at the present time. For in all states of the world, power, authority and sovereignty are the bases on which both the happiness and the unhappiness of people rest. In states like the Nigeria of Obasanjo, Yar’ Adua and Jonathan in which power, authority and sovereignty are over-concentrated at the centre and are routinely misused and abused, there usually is no peace, no security of life and possessions and no just and equitable distribution of wealth and resources. This is made even more harrowing in a country in which the citizenry and the polity come from diverse ethnic, regional and religious communities. To put their argument on this issue in plain language, the main proponents of the SNC are insistent on the claim that power, authority and sovereignty ought not to be concentrated at the centre in a multi-ethnic and pluralistic country like Nigeria. If for one reason or another power and sovereignty have been historically concentrated and have been routinely misused, the most urgent thing to do is to, first, reduce the concentration and secondly, share sovereignty among all the constituent, federating parts.

    On its own terms, this general profile is accurate and incontrovertible. But seen in the light of some large historical realities and circumstances, some questions arise that make it imperative for us to think beyond over-concentration of power and sovereignty at the centre as the only, or even the most important challenge that we face in Nigeria at the present time. Here are some of these questions: What if the over-concentration of power at the centre is not the only source of our problems and crises? Indeed, what if that over-concentrated power and sovereignty is itself the consequence or effect of a deeper malaise, a greater contradiction that cuts across all the ethnic, regional and religious communities in the land? What if the economic, scientific and technological forces of development and modernity that all the communities in Nigeria face are the same and produce broadly similar effects everywhere in Nigeria, West Africa and the African continent? What if our political elites, with few exceptions, have been remarkably clueless as to how to engage these forces and currents of modernity? Finally, what if, indeed, we can meet these forces of capitalist modernity infinitely far more effectively as a united country than as a band of small, autonomous and loosely connected ethnic and regional communities?

    Let me be very clear and upfront about the basis of my position on the SNC: As much as I worry about the over-concentration of power and sovereignty at the centre and the myriad of distortions that it causes, I am far more worried about the hardship and suffering caused throughout the length and breadth of the country among the vast majority of our peoples, north and south, and east and west. I am far more worried about the fact that wealth and power are so vastly unevenly distributed between the elites and the masses in our country than the sharing of power and wealth unequally among our political elites. And simply stated, I cannot imagine that any genuinely democratic SNC at the present time will not place the terrible state of poverty, joblessness and insecurity among the vast majority of Nigerians at the centre of deliberations at the Conference. For poverty, together with the corruption, waste and squandermania that cause and exacerbate it, is, by a long shot, the most important crisis among the myriad of problems and challenges that we face today.

    Out of every 10 Nigerians, 7 live in absolute poverty, this in a land overflowing with oil wealth. Indeed, in many of the rural communities in the land, the figure is close to 8 out of 10. Among our youths, educated and uneducated, the unemployment rate is well over 40%, this in a land in which the median age is 19 – which means that half of the total population is under the age of 19. Moreover, the gap between the tiny haves and the teeming have-nots is not only great but is growing at an alarming rate. These figures are fairly uniformly distributed across the whole country; no region, no ethnic group, no religious community is exempt from the miasmas of poverty, destitution and insecurity ravaging the land. As a matter of fact, ethnicity, regionalism and religion have all been massively and successfully co-opted as powerful tools of mystification by our political elites in keeping things the way they are at the present time.

    There is no reason in the world why the SNC being convened by Jonathan should not combine these two broad profiles: on one hand, redefinition of relations between the centre and its constituent parts, together with reinvention of true and equitable fiscal and administrative federalism; on the other hand, a pooling of all our human and natural resources throughout the country to confront the forces of capitalist modernity. So far, most commentators and proponents of the SNC have been either totally silent or lukewarm on the necessity of linking the two. How this might be accomplished by a careful attention to the composition and agenda of the Conference will be the starting point in next week’s concluding piece in the series.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • National Conference’s many controversies

    National Conference’s many controversies

    When this column tackled the proposed national conference idea on September 22, it was then just a rumour fuelled by the unexpected conversion of both President Goodluck Jonathan and Senate President David Mark to the idea of a dialogue between Nigeria’s interest groups. Since neither of the two leading politicians offered any corroborative explanation for their conversion to an idea they had long sneered at, suspicion was rife that both gentlemen, and perhaps their party, were up to some designs. The president’s first strong indication he had embraced the national conference idea was when he received The Patriots pressure group on August 29. Responding to his visitors, he had suggested he was reaching out to the National Assembly to persuade them of the need to convoke a conference. It was a little shocking to everyone, for the president was until then vehemently opposed to the idea.

    But nothing quite prepared the country for Senator Mark’s spectacular volte face. Three weeks or so before the September 17 resumption of the Senate from break, he had in August during the Nigeria Bar Association (NBA) conference in Calabar harshly denounced those calling for a conference. When, like the president, he became a convert, perhaps because the presidency reached out to him, he offered nothing by way of scientific explanation to justify his turnabout. It was, therefore, based on the suddenness of the conversion of the two leading politicians that this column warned three weeks ago that Nigerians needed to be wary of their subterfuges.

    However, since that warning, a lot has happened, the most remarkable of which was that a president who only last month merely flirted with the idea of a national conference suddenly told the nation on October 1 that a national dialogue would be held. Nothing was stranger than the fact that the announcement almost immediately generated a nasty controversy between what can be loosely described as supporters of the conference and its opponents. It must be clarified that opponents merely take exception to the timing, not the idea itself. On one side are those who appeared contented with the mere mention of a national conference, an idea they had championed for decades. It required little push to make them jump heedlessly on the bandwagon. And on the other side are sceptics who by years of experience, and possessing a knack for political subtleties, have suggested that the country should not give Dr Jonathan the benefit of the doubt until he offers convincing proof that his conversion is genuine.

    With the inauguration of the advisory committee, with the president’s seductive and soothing platitudes on the virtues of dialoguing, and with the ingratiating manner some members of the committee became proponents of the idea, the controversy is bound to become accentuated in the coming weeks, even as the dividing lines harden. The reason is not far to seek. Though the plain outlines of the president’s schemes are not yet apparent, with some suggesting he plans to use the conference both as a pernicious distraction and as a ploy to buy time, he was at least cunning enough, if not outrightly cynical, to saddle the responsibility of designing the conference’s framework on not only a Yoruba politician, but one who had whooped for the idea with theological zeal for years.

    Fortunately for everyone, the dividing lines cut across political affiliations. Though the All Progressives Congress (APC) has not officially responded to the conference idea, a national leader of the party, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has daringly and unequivocally poured scorn on the decision to convoke a conference at this time. According to him, he sees nothing but subterfuge in the decision to hold a conference now, given its nearness to the next general election. In offering his radical and provocative view on the conference, Asiwaju Tinubu is not deterred by the fact the Southwest has for decades been at the forefront of championing the convocation of a national conference or that he could become the butt of fierce criticisms. More, he is even surprised that Nigerians could be so easily lured to support a project of indeterminate dimensions, one he described as a Greek gift.

    Predictably, he has been excoriated by proponents of the conference, many of them his bitter Southwest opponents, whom he knew would descend on him if he championed such incendiary views on the conference. For a politician of his stature, and given the nearness of the next general elections, not to talk of the huge ambition being nurtured by the APC to win the centre, it requires enormous amount of courage and risk-taking to contradict the majority and walk alone. Some leaders of the APC have, however, since embraced his scepticism, even if he still appears the most brazen of the conference’s opponents. The rump Afenifere, a Yoruba socio-political and cultural organisation, has impatiently dismissed any opposition to the conference in its condescending manner, and has fulsomely lent weight to it. Last week, the Awolowo Foundation also eagerly lent weight to the conference, suggesting it is both the right thing to do and also timely. Indeed, it is not even clear that many who support Asiwaju Tinubu are not doing so simply out of respect for him.

    As the advisory committee continues to sit, the scepticism, I am persuaded, is bound to grow, for many will begin to see the dangers and impracticality of holding such a momentous event close to an election year. Already, many commentators are beginning to wonder whether there is not in fact an agenda behind the sudden volte face of the president and the National Assembly leadership. For instance, during the inauguration of the conference advisory committee, the president himself cheerfully argued that the conference would reinforce the unity of the country. Is that a predetermined goal? Could the conference, which the president and the committee said would not have no-go areas, not call into question the unity of the country?

    More importantly, the opposition to the conference is hinged on two planks: the president’s suspicious motive, and his poor timing. Given Dr Jonathan’s fanatical desire to win a second term, and the mercenary zeal with which some of his aides are conjuring circumstances and ideas to favour that second run for office, it would be reckless to think the president is altruistic in championing the conference. And for a president who has waffled over what to call the conference, whether dialogue or conference, national or sovereign, or of ethnic nationalities or of class and social representatives it would be overly optimistic to suggest he is himself persuaded about what he plans to achieve with the exercise, or whether he would be willing to accommodate a radical restructuring of the country.

    On timing, only the most sanguine will suggest that a conference, which may not be held rancour-free, will lead facilely to a peaceful grafting of its decisions into the constitution before the next polls. There is no precedent, either pre- or post-independence, to demonstrate this grafting or implementation can be done surgically neat and easy. It is unlikely that the president does not know the dangers inherent in the process he is casually triggering. The suspicion is that he hopes to capitalise on the rumpus that may eventually accompany the exercise, with some suggesting that if it proves extremely difficult for him to fight for and win a second term, his plan may even be to extend his tenure as a fall-back option. At the least, it is also argued, he could use the conference to keep his opponents busy and distract them from his irresolute handling of the economic, social and security problems besetting the country.

    Dr Jonathan has a fondness for delegating the complex issues of governance to others, particularly committees, until the issues fall into abeyance. There is no proof he is not doing the same even now. If his speech during the inauguration of the conference advisory committee is anything to go by, as well as his October 1 Independence Day address, there is sadly nothing in them to suggest the president and his aides, and other experts drawn inexorably to his bureaucratic shenanigans, have had the time and intellectual resources to examine the steps he is taking on the conference. My suspicion is that very little time was spent on the idea, which in the first instance came either to him or to one of his aides impulsively. It seemed good, and it seemed it would lead to some desired outcomes, and so Dr Jonathan embraced it. There was probably no serious brainwork involved, no privately commissioned expert panels within the presidency, and no attempt to study what the pitfalls of a conference at this time could be, other than perhaps a historical basis for organising such a conference.

    If the presidency had reflected long and deep on the matter before going public with it, officials within the presidency and the National Assembly would have doubtless seen that courageous and deliberate legislative action to tackle the country’s structural imbalances would have made a national conference superfluous. And if in the hypothetical final analysis the conference report terminates at the National Assembly, the public will wonder why it was necessary in the first instance for ethnic nationalities to do the job of the legislature. There are many battles ahead. But until he encounters serious bottlenecks, the president will go ahead with the conference, for he will feel diminished to look back after putting his hand on the plough. Yet, it is hard to see how the exercise will not miscarry, for too many things are stacked against its success, not the least among which are poor timing, suspect motive woven into political ambition, lack of concise vision, and a disconcerting unwillingness to take strong and timeous steps to remedy the country’s diverse problems.

    The Southwest is the most enthusiastic supporter of the conference, and have been intemperate and credulous, in spite of all their learning and supposed democratic credentials, in dismissing opponents of the conference. But I am afraid they are being duped, as they have always been since the Second Republic when they reposed hope in a military overthrow of the Shagari government, and acquiesced to the imposition of Chief Obasanjo in 1999 as sop and conciliation to the Yoruba. Indeed, had fate not intervened, they would have had Mulikat Akande-Adeola as Speaker of the House of Representatives, thus completing the circle of servility and credulity begun when Chief Obasanjo, still energised by his fresh exit from government, foisted Patricia Etteh on the lower legislative chamber to the consternation of every judicious Nigerian.

  • The Teacher’s Burden of Proof

    Too often, the teacher’s employer has interpreted his/her cry for help as a war cry and demanded proof or brought out the armoury

    I’m sure you’re going ‘Oh no, not the matter of teachers again!’ and I’m going ‘Oh yes, it is the matter of teachers again!!’ You remember those famous lines pupils throw at teachers when they arrive late in school? I think they go something like ‘Sorry I’m late to class sir, but I have an excuse’. Well, this column is late celebrating teachers this year but it has an excuse. You see, on my way to, err, the school last week, a plane crash occurred. Which teacher will believe that? Now you know why teachers never believe students’ excuses. But, as we say in Never-never-land, it’s better late than never.

    Today, however, we will be chewing our curd on why the teacher has to perennially provide the burden of proof when he/she cries for help, as in ‘Come on, give me something to work with’, ‘Your child is not behaving well’, or ‘I need more pay in order to even eat decently, you know, like a human being.’ Too often, his/her employer has interpreted it as a war cry and has demanded proof or brought out the armoury. So, the teacher is not only deprived, he now carries on his already scraped head the burden of proof. He must show that his stomach is empty by throwing up bile.

    At various times, secondary school teachers have gone on strike to draw attention to some extremely egregious things. And, as we all know, the members of the academic staff of Nigerian universities and polytechnics have been on strike for a while now. Everyone also knows that is a perfectly legitimate way of crying for help. No matter how serious or frivolous that cry is, however, a decent society should immediately bring out the microscope and swing into action. It would critically examine the issues on their own merit. Certainly, you would not expect a sensitive society to laugh at or deride or even be scornful of a grown man’s cry for help. However, the reactions coming from the government is proof that these cries have been seen as nothing but war hoops to suspect.

    I have always believed in this Chinese dictum that says if you have a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail. The government of this country obviously has a hammer (politics), and it is seeing every problem as a nail (politics). It is therefore swinging that hammer wildly, heartily and with all its strength. In other words, it is going at it with great abandon. First, we are told, those negotiating for the government laughed at the teachers’ demands because they appeared to be outrageous. That laughter must be contagious because right now, the world is laughing at these same people for erecting or buying houses at the deranged sums of billions of Naira. Many who built such houses have since bowed to the merciless hands of death. Sadly, the houses are still there – derelict, unkempt, and ignored by the living – serving as monuments to human foolishness and selfishness, and reminding us that no fond dreams of living on forever can live forever. Pardon the pun.

    Obviously, the laughter treatment did not put the teachers off. Instead, they continued to press on and the government now swung its political hammer wildly at the enemy within. Or is it without? Never mind. The government now says that the teachers are being sponsored by political enemies to score political points. This is called arguing against the man. It is a falsely persuasive tactic that I chide my students for using when they run out of points. Don’t mind the lazy things; when they can’t knock out their opponents’ argument, they then try to knock out the opponent.

    I don’t think any teacher needs to be sponsored by any political foe to prove that he is being underpaid. All the government needs to do is look at the teacher living nearest to Aso Rock. They are many I assure you; they are the thin ones who look mistily at The Rock as they pass by each morning when going to work. Nobody passes by the place except politicians? Are you serious? Pardon me, I really have no idea where the blessed thing lies, being such a stranger to the high and mighty places and people in this country. Then, the government should just ask a few flowing, excessively starched, Agbada to take a trip to a Nigerian classroom for proof. I would have said the cloth alone will do because they will be less prejudicial, but then you need the wearers as well. They will find that it’s worse than a Nigerian police college dormitory.

    Those starched politicians would certainly swing their political hammers less wildly when they are accosted by sights meant only for museum houses. For instance, when they enter a secondary school classroom and find one hundred pairs of eyes staring back at them where there should be only thirty five, with one wretchedly dressed teacher in front, a shudder will pass through them like lightning bolts from their consciences. Then, when they move to a university classroom and find a thousand pairs of eyes sitting, lounging or standing to receive a noon-day lecture in one airless room (the students are now the windows), and all breathing heat and fire on one tiny lecturer, they will exclaim involuntarily like Chief Zebrudiah, ‘Chineke!’ They will wonder why they bothered to send their children abroad to go and learn about human nature when those ones could easily have been in those classrooms sharing all the fun. But wait, there’s more proof to come.

    Then, we can ask our starched agbada to stay and observe a few lessons, and believe me, they will be illuminated on just how well or otherwise the Nigerian student is being groomed to take over from him. Actually, I think that is what will solve this whole problem. They will find that the children of the government functionaries who have not been placed in schools abroad are ruling our classrooms here at home. They bring into class those things the teacher does not even know exist or how to operate. I think they call them electronic gadgets. Then, they bring more money into class that the teacher dares not seize because the children have more access to the law than him/her. They bring more mannerisms into class than the teacher can ever hope to understand or correct because the children have more access to the law than him/her. In my depressed moments, I like to predict that by the time the children we are not grooming now take over the world, the word ‘sanity’ will no longer be a word; it will be a myth. ‘Once upon a time, there was a concept that went by the strange name ‘sanity’…’

    In one of our universities, a student could not pay his school fees on time. A fellow student, related to a serving government functionary, lent out the sum (close to five hundred thousand Naira). The borrower was in for a shocking surprise, if you will pardon the expression, for when he tried to return the money, the lender was surprised and declared it was a gift. Now, how many teachers (primary, secondary, or university) can afford to see, hold or give out that sum in spite of all their labours? The government wants proof the teacher is not being used? Clearly, it cannot handle the proof, for there is your proof.

    An enemy has done this, the government said? Pshaw! The enemy is within us if politics will make us so blind we call black white and white black. When that happens, it is proof indeed that the government does not have much understanding beyond its ears.

  • National economy & colossal theft and squandermania – putting the blame on pipeline vandals!

    National economy & colossal theft and squandermania – putting the blame on pipeline vandals!

    It is difficult to decide which is more absurd, more laughable, President Jonathan’s denial this past week that the national treasury is broke or his assertion that the financial illiquidity of the federal government is limited to July 2013 and is caused exclusively by so-called “pipeline vandals”. As can be seen in the epigraph to this piece, this was what Jonathan told the nation and the world last week: that the country is not broke; that our national economy only experienced a hiccup in July from the nefarious activities of pipeline vandals; and that those who are saying that the country is broke are doing so out of ignorance and political mischief.

    The president is of course completely wrong on both counts. As at the end of this past week, the monthly allocations from our national coffers to the 36 states of the federation have reportedly not been paid for the months of July, August and September. Fearing punitive reprisals from the presidency, the governors have not made their frustration and desperation public. But privately and off the record, they have been grumbling bitterly as they have been trying to meet their recurrent expenditures without the allocations from Abuja. Thus, if you want to know whether or not Nigeria under Jonathan is broke, ask the governors, whether they are in the ruling party, the PDP or in any of the opposition parties.

    The truth is that thanks to corruption, waste and squandermania on a colossal scale, Nigeria is at the moment broke, very broke. Indeed, most pundits and commentators on our national economy have been saying this for at least the last four to five months. And if this is the case, for Jonathan to say that the drop in oil revenues in June allegedly caused by the activities of gangs stealing and selling our crude oil is all we have to worry about is to be both naïve and disingenuous.

    I am not indulging in mere or gratuitous name calling here when I assert that the President is being both naïve and disingenuous in making these two assertions. He is being naïve because he obviously does not know or is untroubled by the fact that every well informed person in Nigeria knows that the country is broke – and not only from the work of “vandals”. And he is being disingenuous because he obviously and quite deliberately wants to avoid responsibility, indeed glaring culpability for the sorry state of our national economy. This piece is motivated solely by this consideration: we must not allow the President to duck his responsibility for both the state of the national economy at the present time and the untold suffering that the generality of our peoples are experiencing on account of the terribly inept and mediocre stewardship that Jonathan has exhibited as the occupant of Aso Rock starting from the time when he was Acting President to the present moment of the third year of his own incumbency. My central argument is that the President comes from a line of political rulers since the inception of the current Fourth Republic in 1999 who have badly, even criminally, mismanaged our national economy; however, Jonathan has far surpassed every previous ruler in incompetence, wastefulness and squandermania in the management of the national economy. Let me now write directly in illustration of this claim.

    The national “savings account” of Nigeria is the so-called “Excess Crude Account” (ECA). Established in 2004, it was created so as to conserve our oil revenues in order to make its accumulation serve as a buffer against the often wide fluctuations of the world oil market and as a sort of “rainy day” fund for the future or long term needs of the country and its peoples. In other words, the ECA is a strategic federation account that calls for the greatest act of prudence, patriotism and responsibility in its management by our rulers, especially the President. As at 2005, the balance in the account stood at $5 billion dollars. Between 2005 and 2010, this balance grew rather exponentially such that by the time Jonathan became Acting President in 2010, the balance stood at around the whopping figure of $20 billion dollars! But ever since then, the account has been relentlessly drawn down and wastefully depleted. For instance, at the beginning of this year, the balance in the account was $11.5 billion dollars; now it is under $4 billion. At this rate, it will be close to zero at the end of the year.

    It is worthy of note that Jonathan has never given any explanations for why in less than three years, he has drawn down and more or less completely depleted the savings in the Excess Crude Account (ECA) from a beginning balance of more than $20 billion dollars to less than $4 billion dollars. It is no mitigation of his culpability that, with regard to where all the monies he has withdrawn for the national savings account went, Jonathan has faced no determined questioning from the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) or any of the other leading and usually vocal advocates of good, accountable governance in our country. That being said, and with a certainty that is informed both by present dire circumstances and even more bleak future prospects for the majority of our peoples, I am arguing here that it is neither too late nor too soon to start asking Jonathan and his administration what they have done with the vast sums of money that have been withdrawn from the ECA. To this I would add that as much as the President himself, the Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has much explaining to do. If, as seems likely, they will not give any explanations at the present time, we must keep our options open so that sometime in the future, changed circumstances will compel them to render an account of their stewardship of our national treasury.

    For now, it is fortuitous for us that Jonathan has left many clues for intrepid souls willing to get to the bottom of this scandal as to what he has done with all the monies that have disappeared from the national savings account under his watch. One of the most astonishing of such “clues” is the N2.58 trillion naira that was paid to both real and fake, actual and phantom oil marketers under the humungous oil subsidy scandal of 2011 in which staggering sums of money were paid for refined petroleum products that were never imported into the country and distributed to Nigerian consumers. In essence this was a “subsidy” to a cabal that comprised many of Jonathan’s cronies and backers during the presidential elections of 2011. To get a sense of the scale of theft and waste entailed in this scam, the sum of N2.58 trillion naira paid out was nine times (900 %) of the budget for oil subsidy for that year, 2011; and it was nearly two and half times (250%) of the total national budget for the whole country for the year. As I have explained several times in this column this is quite easily the greatest single theft from our national coffers in the entire 53 years of our collective existence as an independent nation. Moreover, although all the persons and companies to whom the looted sums were paid are known, together with how much each person or enterprise was paid, not a single naira, not a single kobo has been recovered and paid back to the national treasury from the monumental sums looted in that mother of all scams in our country.

    President Jonathan has never said a word, never given any explanation for how it came to pass that the N2.58 trillion naira that was in excess of both the particular oil subsidy budget and the more general national budget for 2011 disappeared from the national treasury. We must never forget this fact whether or not Jonathan remains in office beyond 2015. But then we must ask ourselves: Why have the Nigerian peoples, especially as represented in their professional, civic and activist organizations and movements, not confronted Jonathan at every point with the sordid, lurid details of this mega-scam? For it is precisely due to the fact that he has never been seriously confronted on this scam – and many others – that Jonathan was emboldened this past week to assert, against the facts and the realities, that Nigeria is not broke and pipeline vandals are the only culprits we should worry about and go after.

    As a matter of fact, Jonathan at the press briefing last week in which he made these absurd claims went so far as to argue that contrary to what anybody may think or say, corruption is not as bad in Nigeria as people make it out to be. Indeed, it is useful to quote Jonathan himself on this point: “If everybody continues to say the problem of Nigeria is corruption, then the feeling is that corruption is our major problem”. In other words, it is only because people say so that corruption appears to be our most important problem; if people stop saying so, corruption will cease being our most important problem! Who has any doubt that behind this facetious and distorted nominalism of Jonathan is the false bravado of a ruler who has never been seriously confronted or challenged on the billions of dollars and trillions of naira that have disappeared from our national coffers since he took office as Acting President?

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu